HISTORY 100WORLD
HISTORYSPRING 1998

13 MARCHENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTICISM

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

In this assignment you should learn to define and discuss the following terms:

Natural Law, The Age of Enlightenment, The Age of Reason, Realist, Nominalist,
Rationalism, natural philosophers, Protestant Reformation, The Clockwork
Universe, Deists, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, constitution, Lisbon Earthquake
of 1755, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, Candide, Voltaire, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Emile, The Age of Romanticism, The Age of Revolution,
The Age of Liberalism, Napoleon Bonaparte.

You should also learn to discuss the following topics:

How was the Scientific Revolution connected with the Age of Enlightenment?

How is Natural Law basic to the Realist point of view?

How did the Rationalists of the Enlightenment view God?

What was the Rationalists' view of Government? Economics?

What was the significance of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755?

What was the point of the novel Candide?

What is the major defect in the Rationalist's view that human affairs are
governed by Natural Law?

How did Jean-Jacques Rousseau exemplify the men and women of the
Enlightenment?

Why did Westerners shift their thought from the principles of the
Enlightenment to those of the
Age of Liberalism?

TEXT

We have viewed the Scientific Revolution as a movement involving a great number
of people over a relatively long period of time, but such movements do not occur
unless there is a consensus, a view shared by the majority of people of the time.
The view that was shared by many Europeans, although certainly not all, during
the period from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries was that the
universe was governed by natural law, a set of physical laws that
could be discovered by the use of reason even if those laws could not be changed.
With every new discovery, the number of people sharing that view increased and
their desire to learn even more about the physical world grew. Moreover, many
people concluded that natural laws governed human affairs and, if humans could
discover those laws, they could act in accordance with them and create an
orderly, equitable, and prosperous society. The period during which these ideas
dominated European thought is usually called The Age of
Enlightenment or, using a term made famous by Tom Paine, The Age of
Reason". From the point of view that we have been stressing in these
essays, it was an era in which the Realist point of view
prevailed, although those people who shared this view are called
Rationalists rather than Realists.

Naturally enough, organized religion opposed this viewpoint and upheld the
traditional Christian belief that the universe and everything that happened in it
was an expression of God's will. When ecclesiastical power was strong enough, the
speculations of the natural philosophers were limited by force, and
prominent advocates of the use of reason such as Roger Bacon, Galileo, Rousseau,
and Voltaire often failed prison, exile, or even the possibility of death for
publishing their beliefs. By 1525, however, the universal Church of the Middle
Ages had disintegrated in the Protestant Reformation, and there was
no unified Christian authority the curb the rationalists. It was perhaps only
natural that the rationalists came to view established religion as an opponent of
free speech, free inquiry, and free thought. Moreover, they rejected the
contention of the varieties of religion of the time to be the possessors of
knowledge that could not be known by reason but only because it had been revealed
to humanity by God. Many of the natural philosophers increasingly became
convinced that the entire universe and its workings could be explained by natural
law and that natural law could be discovered through reason. Some of the artists
and philosophers of the time portrayed the universe as operating like the works
of a perfect clock, and some historians have called this view The Clockwork
Universe. While they were willing to believe that some creator had to
have constructed the clock and set it working, they believed that it now ran
without the intervention or tinkering of its creator. In short, they may have
believed in God, but did not believe that God intervened in human affairs,
punished the wicked, answered prayers, protected the innocent or did any of the
other things that traditional Christianity taught that the Deity did. Such people
were called deists, and Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas
Jefferson, and many other eminent men and women of the time shared this view of
things.

Turning to matters of politics, the rationalists denied the prevailing view that
the forms of government had somehow been instituted among men by God and its was
the Christian's duty "to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's...." The historians
among them noted that, throughout history, governments supposedly instituted by
God or the gods had always worked for the benefit of the powerful few at the
expense of the obedient many. Meanwhile, the travellers among them reported that,
despite the great differences among the peoples of the Earth, their basic
principles of justice and equity were quite similar regardless of their religion.
Based upon these and other considerations, they deduced that the natural laws
governing human communities were that the power of the law and the legitimacy of
the government was derived only from the consent of the community as a whole.
In addition, they held that the proper function of government was to interfere
with the individual as little as possible while still protecting his natural
rights to life and liberty.

Moreover, they concluded that every individual had the natural right to try to
acquire property, meaning by this that every individual had the right to attempt
to gain ownership of some means of production, whether it be a farm, factory, or
the tools of a trade. In the American Declaration of Independence of 1776,
Thomas Jefferson carried these natural rights to their logical
conclusion by saying that the people should rebel against any government that
failed to act in accordance with those principles. The economic significance of
that position was obvious. Any government that tried to protect the property of a
favored class at the expense of others had no right to continued existence. That
view was expressed in greater detail by Adam Smith. In The Wealth of
Nations, Smith argued that, if left alone, people would behave rationally
and try to acquire property. The only was of acquiring property, Smith held, were
by making it or taking it from someone else. Since no one could be satisfied
simply by taking from each other, men would naturally turn to the creation of
property. This, in turn, would increase the total production of goods to the
benefit of all.

The idea that human beings were governed by the same laws as governed the course
of the stars and planets, and that by observing those same laws human communities
could move with the same order and regularity as the heavens was a beguiling one.
And so the era was one of governmental reform. On the Continent, the rationalists
believed that the best form of government was that governed by a powerful but
"enlightened" monarch; in England, the tendency was to create a body of
principles, a constitution (Great Britain has no written
constitution), embodying those expressions of natural law that the monarch was to
follow; and the British colonists in North America formed a representative
democracy in which the representatives of the people were limited by a written
body of principles.

The idea that humans could use their reason to discover and institute perfect
societies was, as we noted, beguiling. So beguiling, in fact, that people
continued through three centuries of increasingly savage and destructive wars to
believe that they were making progress. Many of the societies that they
established or influenced were not much different than those of the past. The
privileged and powerful still ruled and the masses still had little chance to
better themselves. Perhaps they were, in a way, ever more repressive than those
of earlier days. Dissidents, eccentrics, and anyone else who opposed the existing
order could be, and were, considered as behaving irrationally and a threat to
"public order". The Protestant churches, wherever they managed to establish
themselves, proved to be just as repressive as the old universal Church had been,
and both Catholic and Protestant Churches were led by the threat of each other to
adopt even more restrictive policies than had hitherto been the case.

It is interesting to the historian how often ridicule will awaken people to their
self-delusions. One might remember the long fear of nuclear holocaust that
oppressed the American public and found expression in such novels and motion
pictures as "On the Beach" and "Fail Safe". This sense of the inevitability of
annihilation was finally dissipated by the motion picture "Dr. Strangelove", a
painstakingly hilarious parody of "Fail Safe". One could make a very good case
that the Age of Enlightenment began to end with the great Lisbon Earthquake
of 1755. Certainly there had been such disasters before, but this one was
so sudden and destructive that it made dramatic news throughout Europe and caused
many people to begin to wonder about natural law that could govern the planets is
their steady and mathematical course and could also include sudden and
unexplainable calamities. It began to see as if natural law provided no assurance
of order or of permanence.

The effect of this event has been memorialized in Oliver Wendell Holmes's (1809-
1894) poem entitled "The Deacon's Masterpiece", but better known as The
Wonderful One-Hoss Shay. In this poem, Holmes describes a seventeenth-
century deacon who set out to make a perfect one-horse carriage. He chose every
piece with the utmost care and had the carriage built so that there was no weak
point anywhere in its design. He did his work so well that the carriage outlasted
him by many years. Exactly one hundred years later, the owner was riding in this
carriage when it suddenly fell apart into a pile of dust. No single part of it
had been weak, and so it had all broken at the same time. The day that this
happened was, of course, 1 November 1755 -- the day of the Lisbon Earthquake.
Holmes concluded the poem with the lines "End of the wonderful one-hoss shay/
Logic is logic. That's all I say". The point was that a perfect rational argument
is like a balloon. If any one point fails, the entire argument fails, and many
people believe that the Lisbon Earthquake was the point at which the argument
upon which the Age of Reason was constructed failed.

This was much after the fact, however. The short novel Candide by
Voltaire (1694-1778), published in 1759, perhaps had more influence
at the time. The protagonist of the novel, Candide, is a naive young man who is
thrown out into the world and wanders through all of its savagery, often in the
company of his old tutor, Doctor Pangloss, who has convinced himself by rational
demonstration that "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."
Candide comes to believe that "Optimism is a mania for maintaining that all is
well when things are going badly." After a long series of encounters with cruelty
hypocrisy, stupidity, and every other form of human viciousness, Candide retires
to a small plot of land to cultivate and on which to stay as far from idealists
as possible. [Incidentally, Leonard Bernstein composed a delightful opera on
the theme of Candide that you should hear if you get the
opportunity.]

Candide pointed unerringly to the great defect in the idealism of The Age
of Enlightenment. Even if the universe were governed by natural law on the basis
of which humans might live in perfect peace and harmony, the fact of the matter
is that human beings do not always behave rationally. It would seem that, in many
if not most human beings, passions, personal desires, and just downright
silliness often prevail over the exercise of reason. We are quite capable of
thinking one way and then acting in quite a different, and often irrational,
way.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was one of the outstanding
figures of the Enlightenment and a quite despicable man. He extolled the virtues
of family life but slept with his servant girl for some twenty-three years before
getting around to marrying her. His novel Emile set forth most of
the principles of child-rearing that we observe today -- that parents should
teach by example rather than through punishment, that children pass through
stages of development and should not be forced to behave in manners of which they
are not capable, that children should be given time in the sun to laugh and play,
that children should be loved. Every time his girl had one of his children,
however, he had her leave it at a foundling home but continue to draw the charity
milk and bread given to new mothers. He enjoyed a nice bowl of bread and milk.
Even though his actions were reprehensible, we should admire his ideals since
they were the ideals upon which Thomas Jefferson drew in penning the Declaration
of Independence.

Then, too, there was a spirit of rebellion in the air. People, especially young
people, were less willing to accept the conformity and repression of
individuality that Enlightenment society required of its members, colonists were
less willing to accept their continual exploitation in the interests of the
mother country, ethnic minorities were less willing to subject themselves to
attempts to absorb them into the majority culture, workers and peasants were less
willing to admit the superiority of groups claiming special rights by the laws of
nature, travellers were less impressed by the accuracy and symmetry of gardens
such as those at Versailles, composers were less willing to construct intricate
works on the basis of the mathematical models that had guided Bach and Mozart,
and people in general were less willing to accept an ideal of society that seem
to value mediocrity. By the close of the eighteenth century, Europe was entering
a new era. In literature and music, it is called The Age of
Romanticism and was ushered in by Goethe and Beethoven; in government, it
is called The Age of Revolution, and witnessed a wave of colonial
rebellions that swept away the old sea-borne empires; and in politics generally,
it is called The Age of Liberalism, and gave rise to the French
Revolution and the twelve years in which Napoleon Bonaparte
dominated Europe and swept away many of the last remnants of the old and
discredited regimes of the Enlightenment.

ASSIGNMENTS

REQUIRED ASSIGNMENTS

There are not a great number of exceptional sites on the history of the
Enlightenment, but two, The University of Evansville's
Enlightenment, and St. Lawrence University's
Russia in the Age of Enlightenment provide excellent overviews of the
societies of the era.